The Importance of Simulation Software in Investment Casting

Simulation software is a crucial tool in manufacturing, and this is especially true for investment casting. At Dean Group, we make use of bespoke software made for industrial castings. This ensures your parts and components are designed and manufactured to your exact specifications, as it highlights any issues by simulating the exact flow of material.

So, there are many benefits to using this type of software both for the company and the client, and we’ll go through them in this article, highlighting how this can drive prices down and boost accuracy.

Get the Product Right First Time Around

With simulation software technology, which keeps evolving over time, a component can be designed in a more efficient way, which means you increase your chances of getting it right the first time around. In essence, this type of software uses a 3D model that allows us to simulate the casting and check its integrity, including visualising issues like porosity.

So, when it goes to production, there’s no need to worry about re-doing the whole thing or having to make changes to the original design. This will help you save time, money and effort.

Shorter Lead Times

Because of this, you can also benefit from shorter lead times because there are fewer designs and product iterations to consider. The models can be tweaked as many times as necessary and, while this probably requires your input and a bit of back-and-forth to make sure the design is correct, it saves a lot of time because there will be no errors during manufacturing.

Getting your parts quickly also means getting your product to market faster. This is crucial for a wide range of businesses across the UK, so we do our best to work within your deadlines and deliver your castings in a timely manner.

Ability to Simulate Problems

One of the main elements of this type of software is how it allows us to run simulations of parts and components, helping us identify problems and design solutions before the product is even manufactured. These insights are crucial to optimise the process from start to finish.

We can test calculations virtually, which means we don’t necessarily need to create several prototypes until we get it right – with the 3D simulation, all dimensions and tolerances, for example, are accounted for, helping see how the product will perform and if it needs to be adjusted to ensure there are no problems during production.

Lower Costs During Design

All of this leads to a cheaper process, including during the design stage, since we don’t need to run tests on physical components. We can analyse, correct and tweak everything through our computers by simulating the castings, which improves the development time and costs for our clients.

This also helps us deliver the right product the first time around, since we can test the castings’ integrity from the start.

Lower Costs During Production

Of course, simulation software is also useful to keep costs down during production, since it allows for a smooth, error-free process. Fewer mistakes also mean we don’t have to re-do entire orders, saving you time and money. By the time the part is being manufactured, we already know with one hundred per cent certainty that it works as it should.

Less Waste

Dean Group also takes sustainability very seriously, so using simulation software helps us to streamline the manufacturing process by ensuring everything is done right the first time around.

For instance, if a design is optimised from the get-go, we don’t have to create several prototypes or remake orders from scratch, which would waste a lot of materials (not to mention capital). This helps us to achieve our green goals.

What Dean Group Can Do for You

When you choose us as your investment casting company, we can offer you all the benefits mentioned above and more.

Dean Group places a lot of emphasis on front-end engineering to ensure the development phase is as short and clean as possible. We can run simulations that test the quality and integrity of the castings via our bespoke casting simulation software, allowing us to produce successful parts for your project with ease.

In addition, we believe it’s important to keep communication open with our clients, so we make you aware of any possible tweaks that may have to be made throughout the process. This is because we understand you require very specific dimensions, sizes and tolerances, which may have to change as we optimise the design – by keeping you up to date at all times, we can confirm the design with you before it’s produced.

We can also make recommendations to make sure the final product meets all your standards and specifications. We’ve almost half a century of experience in the industry, so we understand how to best create and manufacture your castings.

Get in touch with us if you’d like more information on how we create your components or more details on our services and processes. You can also check out our case studies, like the “automotive: warranty claims drive change” (PDF), to see an example of how we make use of simulation software.